K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Stale NFS file handle errors

Since I’m mentioning quick fixes to otherwise system-crippling errors, I should also make note of the “stale NFS file handle” errors that popped up after the power was accidentally cut in the middle of a large file transfer across my home network.

Rather than eradicate an entire partition though, I got wise and tracked down a better solution: a filesystem check from a live environment. Forcing the check — because the drive is still marked clean, even though those files are real impediments — is necessary, and so for an ext2 drive, a simple e2fsck -f -v -p /dev/hdaX did the trick.

Of course, after the filesystem was corrected, I had to re-rsync those missing files across the network, but that was only a minor inconvenience.